Voorkamerfest: Home Theater

During South Africa's long night of apartheid, white playwright and social commentator Pieter-Dirk Uys felt unable to speak out. So he invented a character who could: Evita Bezuidenhout, the wife of a fictional Afrikaner nationalist figure. In the late 1970s and early '80s, "Evita" lampooned the establishment in a series of satirical diaries. Later, with the help of a wig, heels and a handbag, she became real. Black and white alike loved the subversion. Then, in 1996, Uys took over a derelict railway station in Darling, a semidesert town an hour's drive north of Cape Town, and turned it into a...